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Mr. Speaker, the scientific evidence is overwhelming that embryonic stem cells have great potential to regenerate specific types of human tissues, offering hope for millions of Americans suffering from debilitating diseases.

We finally understand in general terms how a cell is organized, how its specialized organs function in a well integrated manner to insure its survival and replication.

In fact when you combine stem cell technology with the technology known as tissue engineering you can actually grow up entire organs, so as you suggest that sometime in the future you get in an auto accident and lose your kidney, we'd simply take a few skin cells and grow you up a new kidney. In fact this has already been done.

Scientists have stated that embryonic stem cells provide the best opportunity for devising unique treatments of these serious diseases since, unlike adult stem cells, they may be induced to develop into any type of cell.

When we talk about stem cells, we are actually talking about a complicated series of things, including adult stem cells which are largely cells devoted to replacing individual tissues like blood elements or liver or even the brain.

The cell is a city of production centres, each part working away like mad, and it's co-ordinated. Six trillion cells in a body - you can't help but be moved.

Cell culture is a little like gardening. You sit and you look at cells, and then you see something and say, 'You know, that doesn't look right'.

Given the opportunity, under the right conditions, two cells from wildly different sources, a yeast cell, say, and a chicken erythrocyte, will touch, fuse, and the two nuclei will then fuse as well, and the new hybrid cell will now divide into monstrous progeny. Naked cells, lacking self-respect, do not seem to have any sense of self.

Regeneration can come only through a change of heart in the individual.

Through their work with fetal tissue, researchers hope to find ways to harness embryonic stem cells which have the ability to become any type of human cell and could provide new treatments for many illnesses.